Re: What I've discovered so far, in more detail.

Post #13,285 by pwhysall 10/15/01 7:36:26 AM Reply	Re: What I've discovered so far, in more detail. Thirdly, don't expect font smoothing. Currently, XFree supports it as an extension, which means applications have to know to ask for it. I think support for it in GTK/GNOME is experimental but coming. Both [link\|http://www.kde.org\|KDE] and [link\|http://www.gnome.org\|GNOME] support antialiasing (which, incidentally, is NOT the same thing as font smoothing and is not quite the same thing as ClearType as found in Windows XP). KDE does it natively if your X server supports the RENDER extension, GNOME does it via a little library called [link\|http://philrsss.anu.edu.au/~josh/gdkxft/\|gdkxft]. Fourth, the font-hinting in X is pretty bad. This is exacerbated by the fact that most TrueType fonts have no or poor hinting, despite the fact the TrueType hining can be so much better than Type 1. Hinting is a marriage between properly hinted fonts and a font rasterizer that can understand those hints. Most popular TTF fonts are very nicely hinted for the screen - Microsoft's [link\|http://www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm\|core fonts for the web] are a good example of this - the X font rasterizer renders them very nicely. Most T1 fonts are horribly hinted for the screen, if at all, but look better on printed output. Interestingly, with a properly antialiased display (such as that provided by gdkxft, and in stark contrast to the font-shape-munging fontsmoothing of pre-XP Windows), those horrid-looking T1 fonts come back into their own, as the AA performs "hinting on the fly", producing the best possible representation for any glyph, regardless of hintedness. Fifth (!), there are broken TTF files around that Windows will work with but X won't. So far, my solution is to run a Type 1 conversion utility and use them as Type 1. Well, I've not encountered any fonts that I can't use, but then, I don't really stray far beyond the core T1 fonts that came with Red Hat 7 and the MS core web fonts. I don't doubt that they exist; there are enough shonky TTF editors for Windows out there that probably produce extremely iffy TTF output... Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #13,456 by static 10/15/01 10:01:21 PM Reply	Hinting and AA/smoothing. There is a multitude of terms and misunderstandings surround anti-aliasing and font-smoothing. I used Microsoft's term for whatever they do in Windows. I know "ClearType" is in a separate category, though. It's encouraging that AA is coming along so well under X. I know Microsoft spent a lot of effort in properly hinting their fonts. I should have said. I went rummaging in the newsgroups and in search engine for Type 1 fonts. Most of them are TrueType, though. That's where I found the broken one I referred to. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #13,525 by pwhysall 10/16/01 3:30:05 AM Reply	:heh Well, I'm a bit of an AA snob (no, really I am :-), as I'm originally from the Acorn scene, where RISC-OS had actual sub-pixel-antialiasing and fully hinted (for screen AND print) outline fonts as part of the OS from 1988 onwards. When a 1MB, 8MHz home computer did it properly nearly 14 years ago, and the penny is only just dropping in the all-powerful Windows and UNIX scenes... well. "About bloody time" is a phrase that leaps to mind. And neither platform (nor the Mac, either) has the single, equally-suited-for-screen-and-print outline font technology that RISC-OS had... BTW, ClearType (as practiced by XP) doesn't look so hot on a CRT (at least to my eyes). Where it comes into its own is on a laptop, where it looks absolutely fab. /me goes off to fire up his A5000 just to see Fonts Done Right. Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #13,530 by static 10/16/01 3:46:42 AM Reply	Ah - retro-computing is a wonderful thing. Mind you, it does point out that not only has Microsoft stagnated the computer industry, but also that the Linux and BSD et al communities are only competing against Microsoft's fairly mediocre and out-of-date technologies. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #13,531 by pwhysall 10/16/01 3:48:50 AM Reply	nogsh Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #13,580 by inthane-chan 10/16/01 11:50:27 AM Reply	Cleartype on CRT. I'm actually using it here at work - and the main advantage isn't that it looks good at traditional resolutions - it's that you can get "smaller" resolutions that are readable without killing your eyes. My "host" machine (the machine I don't screw with for testing purposes - houses e-mail, bug tracking software, etc) has a 15" monitor attached - I keep the 17" for doing my main work. I used to run it @ 800x600, because my eyes hurt when I ran it @ 800x600. With Cleartype, I can run it @ 1024x768, and it works fine... "He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche
Post #13,554 by jb4 10/16/01 9:30:35 AM Reply	gdkxWTF??? Wade, here's the next frontier for Linux (and any other UNIX wannabe): Drop the bullshit TLAs (4LAs, 5LAs, etc.) and speak fucking English (or some other recognizable tongue). gdkxft??? nogsh??? What the fuck is that unintelligble gibberish? Linux will never take over the desktop until its users can pronounce its vocabulary. And all this random place-a-buncha-letters-in-a-blender-and-see-what-comes-out bullshit that makes the geekazoids feel oh-SO-cool about themselves is just so much pud-pulling. Complain about DCL's verbosity all you want, but anybody could look at a DCL script and tell what it did even if it was/in spite of whether it was written by a former UNIX geek! jb4 (Resistance is not futile...)
Post #13,558 by admin 10/16/01 9:57:22 AM Reply	nogsh: stands for "nog that shit"; it's an emote from IWETHEY Interactive. Nog, incidentally, is a typoed version of "nod" that took on a life of its own. So, nogsh is slang for "yes, I agree totally". :-) Can't help you on the other one. :-) Regards, -scott anderson
Post #13,559 by pwhysall 10/16/01 10:10:21 AM 10/16/01 10:11:40 AM Reply	Re: gdkxWTF??? DCL is never intelligible, here's a fragment : $! IF f$getdvi(F$trnlnm("MT_TK70"),"EXISTS") .EQS. "TRUE" $! THEN $! IF first_drive .EQS. f$getdvi(F$trnlnm("MT_TK70"),"FULLDEVNAM") $! THEN $! init 'first_drive' 'tape_id'-01 $! fnd_drv=1 $! mount/noassist/foreign 'first_drive' $! ENDIF $! ENDIF Yes, it's nicely indented. Yes, I do know what it does. Can you tell that this particular code fragment is actually commented out? (This is from our site backup script, btw) gdkxft is a small library that hooks up GDK to the Xft extension of XFree86. All you need to know is that you get luvly antialiased fonts. Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] Edited by pwhysall Oct. 16, 2001, 10:11:40 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #13,561 by pwhysall 10/16/01 10:13:39 AM Reply	nogsh Is the "Agreement" shell, found on Snobbian 2.2 systems especially. Of particular note is the fact that nothing you can do is actually wrong. Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #13,697 by static 10/16/01 10:27:06 PM Reply	Understanding the technology. People who are going to insist Linux behaves largely the same way as Windows are going to have the most trouble. That includes the terminology of both. Now, that said, I don't think you're in that category, but I do see you have a genuine problem. I can't see font-management and all that goes along with it on Linux approaching the way Windows works. Part of that is the multi-user, network-oriented approach to it all that Windows simply does not do well, but part of that is it is simply The Linux/Unix Way to expose a lot of the underlying modules. So, X11 has a font server, Gnome and KDE have font-smoothing modules, and GhostScript also has it's own font renderer are going to remain public knowledge for quite a while. I don't think all that many people will have problems with knowing this. Of course, they shouldn't need to know quite all of this. At the very most, none of this need be visible unless they want to add a font. Then a font-installer should handle the rest of it. All other detailed knowledge should be optional. That means that if you don't need or want to know that Gnome uses a particularly library by a particular name to enable font-smoothing, then yes, those that are comfortable with module names need to get more in the habit of saying "Yes, Gnome can do anti-aliasing. If you're curious, the module is called gdkxft" or something like that. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"

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